Holy Cross sit-in ends after meeting between students and administration

Bill Shaner Reporter @bill_shaner

Tuesday

Feb 5, 2019 at 9:29 PM

After receiving some concessions from the administration, student activists vowed to keep the pressure on as a sexual misconduct scandal at Holy Cross boils to a head.

“This is not over,” said Mithra Salmassi, one of the student organizers, as the students ended a two-day sit in outside the administration offices in Fenwick Hall.

“We can all come away from this protest from my eyes seeing it as a success,” she said. “We have really pushed the administration and I believe we have conveyed to them that we expect more and we deserve better as a student body.”

Salmassi was one of several students to meet for roughly an hour with Holy Cross President Philip Boroughs and other school officials. As a result of the meeting, Boroughs will draft an open letter acknowledging the students’ concerns and issue a report on a 20-month investigation into a sexual misconduct claim against a professor.

Before the meeting, the students passed out sheets of paper with their specific demands.Broadly, those demands were for a public acknowledgement from the administration that it did not make an investigation into professor Christopher Dustin’s misconduct public as well as a policy that, in the future, dictates the removal of a faculty or staff member accused of sexual misconduct from campus. The students also asked the administration to fire Dustin and rescind the Distinguished Teaching Award he received in 2004, bring on an impartial third party for a Title IX audit, and release a report detailing the timeline of the investigation into Dustin.

Dustin was demoted from dean to professor amid sexual misconduct allegations brought forward by a former student and was placed on leave for the Spring 2019 semester.

A Holy Cross student told Worcester Magazine in story published Jan. 24 Dustin had made passes and sexually-charged comments while she wrote her senior honors thesis under his mentorship. The student, who spoke anonymously, said the advances gave way to intimidating behavior and abuse of power regarding the grade of her thesis in Spring 2017. She reported the conduct to the college’s Title IX office in April, 2017. In June, she declined to pursue an informal resolution offered the college, leading to a formal investigation which took approximately 20 months.

In a statement, a spokesman for Holy Cross called the meeting productive and positive.

“Both the administration and students have some follow up work to do, but they identified some clear next steps and areas of consensus. We are continuing to work together and feel good about where we are in this important conversation,” he wrote.

Salmassi said the student organizers will be pressing for more from the administration, and if they don’t get it, she threatened another sit-in.

“If we are not satisfied I can guarantee everyone here that we will be right back out in this hallway for aw long as it takes for them to meet our demands,” she said.

One of the demands not yet met by the administration is the firing of Professor Dustin. Per the organizers, the administration will issue a letter with information on why, legally, they cannot meet every demand made by students.

As for the sit-in, the air was thick, humid and smelled of pizza as about 150 students lined the hall. They worked on laptops, talked in group and played music. The mood was an optimistic one, if a little subdued, as many of the students had spent hours on the floor for two days.

“It’s inspiring, it’s intersectional, people are pumped,” said Hamilton Wyatt-Luth, Holy Cross student and member of the Holy Cross chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. “I’ve heard from a lot of different people that they’ve never seen anything like this."